In the 28th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s figure out how to express business rules & logic to Excel.
What is in this session?
What good are spreadsheets if they can’t solve business problems?
But we all struggle when it comes to modeling real world business conditions in Excel. For example, if you have below business rule to decide how much discount to offer a customer,
- If the customer bought 3 or more times previously and offer 15% discount
- If the customer bought 1 or 2 times previously AND customer’s age is >40, offer 10% discount
- If the customer visited our New York store between 6PM-9PM offer 5% discount
- Else no discount
How would you go about modeling these in Excel?
That is our topic for this podcast session.
In this podcast, you will learn
- The challenge of modeling business logic & rules in Excel
- My struggles with such formulas in early days
- 4 features of Excel that can help you with this.
- 1. Logical formulas
- AND
- OR
- NOT
- XOR
- 2. Support formulas
- IF
- IFERROR
- CHOOSE
- 3. Information formulas
- IS functions
- 4. Operators
- Brackets
- +*- operators
- Example business rules & how to write formulas for them
- Conclusions
Listen to this session
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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Click here to download the MP3 file.
Links & Resources mentioned in this podcast
Logical formulas – Syntax & Examples:
Support functions & concepts:
Advanced business rules & scenarios:
Homework for you:
- Write a formula to check if 2 dates are in same month
- Write a formula to check if few cells have same value
- An IF formula challenge for you
- Can you calculate sales commission?
Transcript of this session:
Download this podcast transcript [PDF].
What challenges do you face when modeling business rules / logic?
When I was learning Excel, I struggled a few years understanding the concept of logical functions. Of course I was in college, so I had all the time in world to explore and learn.
What about you? Do you write formulas that model real world logic? Where do you struggle? Please share your thoughts & inputs in comments section so that I can help you better.
IF(AND(like chandoo.org, love podcast),
If you like chandoo.org & our podcast, please take a minute and do one or both of below:
- Leave a honest review on iTunes
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13 Responses to “Convert fractional Excel time to hours & minutes [Quick tip]”
Hi Purna..
Again a great tip.. Its a great way to convert Fractional Time..
By the way.. Excel has two great and rarely used formula..
=DOLLARFR(7.8,60) and =DOLLARDE(7.48,60)
basically US Account person uses those to convert some currency denomination.. and we can use it to convert Year(i.e 3.11 Year = 3 year 11 month) and Week(6.5 week = 6 week 5 days), in the same manner...
This doesn't work for me. When applying the custom format of [h]:mm to 7.8 I get 187:12
Any ideas why?
@Jason
7.8 in Excel talk means 7.8 days
=7.8*24
=187.2 Hrs
=187 Hrs 12 Mins
If you follow Chandoo's instructions you will see that he divides the 7.8 by 24 to get it to a fraction of a day
Simple, assuming the fractional time is in cell A1,
Use below steps to convert it to hours & minutes:
1. In the target cell, write =A1/24
2. Select the target cell and press CTRL+1 to format it (you can also right click and select format cells)
3. Select Custom from “Number” tab and enter the code [h]:mm
4. Done!
Hi, sorry to point this out but Column C Header is misspelt 'Hours Palyed'
good one
So how do I go the other way and get hours and minutes to fractional time?
If you have 7.5 in cell A1,
- Use int(A1) to get the hours.
- Use mod(A1,1)*60 to get minutes.
If you have 7:30 (formatted as time) in A1
- Use hours(a1) to get hours
- Use minutes(a1) to get minutes.
I had the same issue. You can solve it by changing the format as described above:
Right click cell > Format Cells > (In Number tab) > Custom > Then enter the code [h]:mm
([hh]:mm and [hhh]:mm are nice too if you want to show leading zeros)
Thanks guys, these are the tips I'm looking for.
...dividing the number of minutes elapsed by the percent change is my task - "int" is the key this time
It doesnt work for greater than 24 hours
It returns 1:30 for 25.5 hours. It should have returned 25:30
Ideally I would right function as
=QUOTIENT(A1,1)&":"&MOD(A1,1)*60
Sorry, replied to wrong comment....
----
I had the same issue. You can solve it by changing the format as described above:
Right click cell > Format Cells > (In Number tab) > Custom > Then enter the code [h]:mm
([hh]:mm and [hhh]:mm are nice too if you want to show leading zeros)
Clever use of MOD here to extract the decimal part of a number. Divide a number containing a decimal by 1 and return the remainder. Humm. Very clever.
Thanks very much, extremely useful !